by Hunt, S. A.
“Fair enough.”
“Besides.” Joel pointed at his face. “I’m black and gay. Goin to the cops ain’t gon’ be my first instinct.”
Bowker gave it some thought and tapped the pen on the table. “Mr. Ellis, we here don’t discriminate, okay?” He pointed at his own face, to the Jarhead high-and-tight haircut. “Now, I may look like Cletus T. Asshole, but I want to assure you that you’re as important to me and everybody else here as the next guy.”
He glanced at Robin. “…Or gal.”
Joel nodded quietly. “Okay.” He bit down on a tight smile. “All right. Aight, we’re cool.”
“Now, you said you met him at his apartment. I’m assuming your vehicle is still over there on the property, if this ‘Big Red’ hasn’t moved it to another location.” Bowker fetched a huge sigh. “What I’m gonna do is, I’m going to follow you-all over there to his apartment and we’re gonna kill two birds with one stone—get your car and see if this fella is at home.”
❂
The closer they got to Riverview Terrace Apartments, the antsier Joel became until he cracked the window and bummed a cigarette off of Kenway. Robin sat in the middle, the twenty-sided die gearshift between her knees. He had power-smoked the Camel down to the filter by the time they pulled into the parking lot fifteen minutes later. As soon as they came around the corner of the building and started seeing the 400 block, Joel threw his head back and swore in anguish.
Black Velvet was gone.
“I’m not surprised,” said Kenway. “It’s probably at the bottom of Lake Weiss.”
“You better hush your mouth. I’d sooner you take the Lord’s name in vain than insinuate somebody’s hurt my baby,” Joel told him, and slipped into a loud and vehement string of curses, his fists clenched. “Hell to the naw—I just had that sound system put in there. This is some grade-A bullshit.” The truck curved to a stop in front of 427 and Bowker’s cruiser slid into a space across the way.
They all got out, except for Joel, who stayed in the Chevy. As soon as Robin shut the door, he locked her out.
The bitter, clean smell of cut grass lingered in the air, even though the lawn was brown. Bowker knocked on Red’s door. “Police.” No answer. He knocked again, this time more insistently. After there was again no answer, he went to the front office to fetch the property manager and get a key.
Robin pressed the rims of her hands to the apartment’s window and peered through them, trying to see past the blinds, but they were turned so that the cracks between the vinyl slats afforded no visibility at all.
Even though she knew full well that the front door was locked, she took hold of the knob and tried to turn it.
(gotta go gotta get out pack it up go go go)
She snatched her hand back. That was strange. She stepped away, cautiously, as if she’d encountered a beehive. Disembodied smells filled her nostrils: expended gunpowder, sizzling steak.
The green scent of cut grass became stronger. She was overcome by the sudden and intense need to flee, mixed with a cold cloak of guilt. Not remorseful guilt, but only the clear recognition of culpability; she felt chastised for something she’d never done. Abstract words flickered in her head, Polaroids of excited fear.
(stupid let your guard down shoulda done em both)
“What was that about?” asked Kenway. “You jerked like you touched a live wire.”
“I don’t know.” She looked at the palm of her hand. Residual paranormal power? Am I picking up on it? If so, it was the first time anything like that had ever happened. She wasn’t even sure if it was a thing that could happen—the witches were the only ones with any paranormal ability, weren’t they? The sigils and runes decorating her body deflected paranormal energy like a sort of metaphysical armor, but other than the hallucinations of the owlheaded Sasquatch, Robin had never been privy to any kind of paranormal sensitivity. The sigils were an umbrella, but she had never felt the rain itself before. It was a bit like discovering a new sense.
Maybe her sigils being overpowered by Weaver at the hospital had left her sensitive, like sunlight on a burn. Maybe…maybe it was the proximity to Cutty. The creases in Robin’s palm shined in the sun as she flexed her hand. Was Cutty so powerful that her power overflowed into the streets?
Could simply being the daughter of a witch mean Robin could siphon off surplus power like some kind of psychic vampire? She had certainly wondered over the years whether she had inherited some modest fraction of whatever paranormal talent lay within her mother Annie. As far as Robin knew, witchcraft began with a singular ritual, and had nothing biologically to do with the witch herself—it was all on the paranormal side of the equation, spiritual, exterior to genetics, initiated by the sacrifice of the heart to Ereshkigal.
She checked her cellphone. Call me back, Heinrich, damn you. Robin crammed it back into her jacket pocket.
Lieutenant Bowker came back with the property manager, a limping stump of a man with a Boston terrier’s googly eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard. His golden bouffant was parted in the center like a monkey’s ass. The name embroidered on his shirt was ROGER.
The manager unlocked the door and stepped aside for Bowker, who strode in with his hand on the butt of his pistol.
“Well, damn,” said the officer.
The living room was completely devoid of furniture—of anything, really, that said a human had been living here until last night. The walls were bare, and the spotlessly clean carpet wasn’t even marred by the footprints of a sofa’s legs.
Robin searched the kitchen with her GoPro. No appliances stood on the counters. No food in the cabinets, no food in the fridge except for a single Arby’s sauce packet in the crisper.
Bowker came out of the bedroom. “Can you tell me who the apartment is leased to?”
“Yeah, sure.” Roger stared at the clipboard in his hand. “Says here it’s a fella by the name of Richard Sutterman.” He looked up and shrugged. “I don’t get back here much other than to check on old Mr. Brand in 432. Always havin to snake his toilet out, sewage backin up into his bathtub and whatnot. I don’t recall what this Sutterman looks like.”
Joel leaned against the front door’s frame. “That name mean anything to you?” Bowker asked him.
“Never heard it before in my life.”
Bowker rubbed his face in exasperation and tossed a hand. “I can head back to the station and look through the database, or maybe go talk to the county clerk and see if he can find any info more concrete on this Sutterman fella, but….” His offer tapered off, the unspoken admission hanging in the air: it ain’t much to go on.
Psychic whispers still lingered in the air, tracing cobweb fingers along the rims of Robin’s ears.
She got a faint mental flash of a vial, and a hand using a hypodermic needle to draw out a tiny bit of the contents. Then she flashed on an image of that same needle being injected into a grilled steak. She also got a flash of three words—Yee Tho Rah—but had no idea what they meant.
“Come on, the trail’s cold for now,” she said, sidling past Joel. “I’ve got some editing to do while I think, and then I want to go have a look at my old house.”
17
THE SHOPS AND OFFICES of Blackfield wheeled past the windows of Mike DePalatis’s police cruiser. “The old fairgrounds?” asked Opie from the passenger seat. “I ain’t been out there in a long-ass time. Not since I was a kid.”
“I never been there.” Mike’s eyes darted up and down the street as he sucked on the last of his milkshake. “I moved to Blackfield in 2006. When did they shut that place down, the 80s?”
“1987, I believe.”
Mike closed in on Broad Avenue and headed east toward the highway, passing the city limits sign.
It took him longer than he expected to find the turn-off for the fairgrounds. Lined with trees the whole eight miles out to the interstate, the highway was littered with weedy side-roads, all of them twin dirt ruts with mohawks of grass. A few of them went out to abandoned pr
operties with overgrown houses, some to improvised dumps with rusty mattress-frames, ragged recliners, weatherbeaten sofas. One even went to a rumored pet cemetery, and you weren’t going to get Mike out that way if you offered him a million damn dollars.
Ultimately what tipped him off that he’d found the right track was the NO TRESPASSING sign nailed to a tree, thirty years old if a day and speckled with .22 holes. On the other side of the highway was a small gravel clearing, presided over by a dilapidated aluminum gas-station awning.
Some forty yards back, a steel pole as big around as Mike’s arm stretched across the grassy path. He angled the police car into the ruts and drove into the woods, the undergrowth brushing and clattering against the Charger’s undercarriage.
Pulling up to the gate, Mike opened the door and started to get out. “I got it,” Owen said helpfully, throwing himself out of the car. He checked the gate and found that there was, indeed, a chain confining the gate to its mount, and a padlock secured it. Two of them, in fact. Hypothetically they could go around it, if not for the impenetrable forest on either side.
“Shit.” Mike put on his hat and got out of the car anyway. “Looks like we’re walking.” He hopped over the gate, his keys jingling.
“Maybe we could try our keys on them padlocks,” said Owen, glancing over his shoulder as they set off into the tall grass. “I locked my keys in my truck once, one of them GMC crew cabs? And my neighbor? I don’t know what got into his head but he tried his minivan key and I’ll be damned if it didn’t unlock my truck.”
“Weird. I don’t think a car key will work on a padlock, though.” The grass beat against Mike’s shins, and hidden briars plucked at his socks. “When we get out of here, you might want to check yourself for ticks. Few years ago I was part of a search effort out in woods like this, and when I got home I found one on my dick.” He made a fist and held it up, demonsrating the tick’s exact placement by pressing his other thumb to his wrist. “It was snuggled up right behind the head.”
“Oh, that’s horrible,” said Owen. “I would’ve lost my mind.”
“I had to go get my wife to pull it off. We tried to suffocate it with nail polish, we tried heating it up, we tried alcohol. No fun. You ever held a lighter to your dong?”
Owen laughed like a kookaburra.
Conversation slipped into silence again. The two men walked for what felt like a half an hour, forging through tall wheatgrass and the occasional clump of blackberry brambles. This time of year there weren’t any berries, and what there was, had rotted into pulpy purple tumors that oozed at the slightest brush.
Mike glanced at his partner as they walked. Officer Owen Patrick Euchiss was a scarecrow with an angular Van Gogh face. The black police uniform looked like a Halloween costume on him. They called him Opie after the sheriff’s son on The Andy Griffith Show because of his first two initials, which he signed on all of his traffic citations. It looks classier, he’d said one day. Like one of those ‘fancy-pants authors’.
His constant sly grin reminded Mike of kids he’d gone to school with, the little white-trash hobgoblins that would snort chalk dust on a dare and brag about tying bottle-rockets to cats’ tails. Middle-age had refined him a little, but the Scut Farkus was still visible under Opie’s mask of dignified wrinkles. Rumor around the station was that Owen had never passed the Georgia civil service test, but had gotten the job through nepotism. Apparently someone was good friends with the chief, and a late-night phone call was all it took to make Chief Lowry look the other way.
And somehow, in the end, DePalatis had gotten stuck with Opie.
It never paid to be the nice guy, did it?
“Ferris wheel,” said Owen, snapping Mike out of his reverie. He straightened, peering into the trees.
The track they were walking down began to widen, grass giving way to gravel, and skeletal machines materialized through the pine boughs. They emerged into a huge clearing that was once a parking lot, and on the other side of that was an arcade lined with tumbledown amusement park rides, the frames and tracks choked with foliage.
Had to admit, the place had a sort of post-apocalyptic Logan’s Run grandeur about it. A carnival lost in time.
Not any better than the pet cemetery.
The two policemen walked aimlessly down the central avenue, heels crunching in the flaky gravel, their eyes searching the remnants of Wonderland. “What are we supposed to be looking for?” asked Owen. “Demon clowns? ‘Uh heh heh! We all float down here, Georgie!’”
“You heard the same thing I heard.”
“‘Something shady’.”
“Ayup.” Mike made a face. “That’s really not a very funny joke, by the way.”
Owen grinned.
They came to a split, facing a concession stand. Owen took out his heavy skullcracker flashlight and broke off to the left, heading toward a funhouse. “I’ll check over here.”
Mike went right. A purple-and-gray Gravitron bulged from the woodline like an ancient UFO. Across the way from that was a tall umbrella-framed ride, chains dangling from the ends of each spoke like fishing poles.
He contemplated this towering contraption and decided it had been a swing for kids, but without the seats it could have been a centrifuge where you hung slabs of beef from the chains and spun the cow blood out of them. Or maybe it was some kind of giant flogging-machine that just turned and turned and whipped and whipped.
When the rides had been damaged enough and lost so much of what identified them, they became alien and ominous.
Deeper into the park, Mike found a gypsy village of third-wheel mobile homes, giant holes punched in their roofs by the elements. Bushes cloaked their flanks and bristled from inside.
Something whiny bit him on the face and he slapped a mosquito. Blood on his fingers. He wiped it on his uniform pants.
After wandering in and out of the nine caravans of the carnie village, Mike decided that none of them were in good enough shape to sustain life. Every one of them was beat to hell and falling apart, scrap metal and flat tires. He headed back into the main arcade.
At this point he had developed an idea of what Wonderland looked like from above: an elongated I like a cartoon dog-bone, with a Y on each end, the arcade forming the long straight part down the middle.
Mike stood at the west end of the dog-bone, staring at the concession stand, and took his hat off to scratch his head.
He took the left-hand path, walking toward the funhouse. Behind the concession stand to his right was a series of roach-coaches: food trucks with busted, cloudy windows, wreathed in tall grass. After the funhouse he found a Tilt-a-Whirl, an honest-to-God Tilt-a-Whirl. Bushes and a tree thrust up through the ride, dislodging plates of textured metal and upending the seashell-shaped cars.
“What a shame,” he told the wilderness.
A wooden shed with two doors stood behind the Tilt-a-Whirl, quite obviously an improvised latrine. He wondered if Porta-Potties had even been invented in 1987. He opened a door and found it full of hickory bush, leafy switches bursting up out of the shit-hole.
“Hey Owen!” Mike shouted into the trees. “Where’d you go?”
A behemoth of a generator trailer lurked in the tall grass, an olive-gray box the size of a minivan with cables snaking out of it every which way. Here, the treeline marked the end of Wonderland. A chain-link fence tried to separate fun from forest, but sagged over, trampled by some long-gone woodland animal.
Mike went around the generator to the woodline and looked both ways. Tucked behind the back wall of the Tilt-a-Whirl, a pair of gray-green military Quonset huts nestled against the trees. One of them opened at the end in a door with no window in it, secured with a padlock.
NO ADMITTANCE—EMPLOYEES ONLY!
“The hell?” He lifted the padlock. It was a new Schlage, no more than a couple of years old.
The door itself wasn’t quite up to snuff. As Mike tried the doorknob, the entire wall flexed subtly with the muffled creak of leather. Old plywoo
d? He pressed his palms against the door and pushed. The striker plate crackled and the wall bowed inward several inches.
“Geronimo,” he grunted, and stomp-kicked the door. The entire wall shook and dirt fell out of the hut’s roof.
Another kick set the door crooked in the frame. The third kick ripped the striker out and the whole door twisted to the inside, the hinge breaking loose. Inside was pure jet-black car-full-of-assholes darkness. Mike took out his flashlight and turned it on, holding it by his temple.
Dust made soup of the air. He stepped into the hut.
A workbench stood against the wall to his right, and a dozen buckets and empty milk jugs were piled in the corner, all of them stained pink. Wooden signs and pictures were stacked against the walls:
VISIT HOOT’S FUNHOUSE!
ARE YOU TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL? DRINK FIREWATER SARSAPARILLA!
GET LOST IN OUR HALL OF MIRRORS!
Three hooks jutted up from the bare cement floor in the middle of the room. Chains were attached to them, and the chains led up to three pulleys, which angled them down to hooks on the back wall.
Old blood stained the floor around the hooks.
“Ah, no,” said Mike, drawing his pistol.
On the other side of the workbench was a door. He gave the stains a wide berth, sidling along the wall.
The door was already cracked open. Flashlight in one hand and pistol in the other, he crossed his wrists Hollywood-style and pushed the door open with his toe. Behind the door, the polished black body of a Monte Carlo reflected his Maglite beam.
POW! A Taser cartridge exploded in the eerie stillness. A bolt of lightning hit Mike in the ass and he barked like a seal, his knees buckling.
Staccato electricity pulsed down the Taser’s flimsy wires, tak-tak-tak-tak, racing down the backs of his thighs. Streaks of prickling pain shot up his spine. He hit the floor bleating in a weird tremolo. His hands balled into fists and his toes scrunched inside his shoes.